Glittering Stones >> Huge Diamond

Huge diamond

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 - Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had found a diamond in space, and it's big… actually big. The object, strictly known as BPM 37093, is a crystallized white dwarf star roughly 4,000 km across. The astronomers call it a diamond, because it's made up of crystallized carbon bounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gasses. It's understood that this is the final outcome for many stars, including our own Sun. In five billion years our Sun would become a white dwarf and three billion years after that the carbon would crystallize to form a gigantic diamond.

The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 55 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurs. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,590 miles across and weighs 6 million trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 12 billion trillion carats, and a one followed by 34 zeros.

"It's the mother of all diamonds!" says Metcalfe. "Some people refer to it as 'Lucy' in a tribute to the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.'"

The diamond star completely outclasses the prime diamond on Earth, the 532-carat Star of Africa which resides in the circlet Jewels of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the main diamond ever found on Earth, a 3,120-carat gem.

The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is in fact a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear energy and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is covered by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

For more than four decades, astronomers have consideration that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct evidence became likely only recently.